Category: Gary Fletcher

I’ve noticed in the last couple of years that while writing I tend to skip over little words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ and the like. I also sometimes skip over letters. For example, the word ‘look’ turns into ‘lok.’

It gets worse. Now I’m occasionally missing entire words, a real problem for reading comprehension, as you can imagine.

What’s next? Perhaps I’ll write one opening sentence, then the final sentence and completely omit everything between the two. To wit, the following article:

First sentence: “We’re always walking by this spooky old house,” my wife said.

Last sentence: Just understand that you are competing with ghosts for my attention.

The thought amuses me. It’s like one of those ‘choose your own adventure’ books. Anyway, here’s the adventure I chose.

Train of Thought

“We’re always walking by this spooky old house,” my wife said.

We sure are. The two of us go for a constitutional that takes us through the same neighborhoods with routes only slightly different from day to day. Sometimes that means travelling north along Dartford Street to the intersection of Lorne Avenue. The house is one of those old three story jobs with a full basement. It has those narrow, rectangular windows at ground level that let light into the basement and, if you are in the basement, allow you to see people’s feet walking by.

This made me remember when I was about five years old. I was with my big brother, Bob, as he went to visit one of his friends, Pete Salvail. Pete was one of about 18 kids and he slept in a little room with some of his brothers, the window right alongside a sidewalk; not a basement window, but my memory makes the connection all the same.

My brother raps on the window, waking Pete up…

I remember that a few years later Pete died of cancer, maybe 20 years old. Years later Bob told me of going to visit Pete in the hospital and saying to him, sadly, “You’re going to die, aren’t you?” Pete nodded and there were tears, both of them. A nurse came in and angrily told Bob to get out, and he did, and that’s the last time he saw Pete.

Bob remembered his friend could be a crazy fucker sometimes. Bob told me that one time they got in Pete’s car and the windshield was all fogged up. Pete starts up the car and then presses his two thumbs up against the windshield, clearing up two spots like eye holes to look through and puts it in gear and goes driving off into the night.

I remember now that Pete had married maybe a year before he died. His wife’s name was Wendy. She was nice enough, petite, and also had a reputation of being a little crazy. Years later (15 or 16 years later) my brother moved in with me (enroute from the breakup of his marriage) and we ran into her. She was either helping out or perhaps registered with some kind of rehab program, which was located in a kind of meeting room with a billiard table in it.

So now I remember that Bob and I went there to visit her but Bob met up with a couple of crazy old drunks there and one thing led to another and he ended up giving these guys a ride home after they got too pissed up and could barely move.

One of them was crippled up, too, and the next thing you know he’s calling my brother to bum a ride all the time. So Bob’s doing this, but charity is a pain in the ass sometimes and it was getting pretty annoying. So this reminds me of another thing.

The old guy calls and Bob answers, but tells him, “No, this isn’t Bob. I’m his brother, Gary.”

He says, “Oh, sorry, could I speak to Bob?”

“No. Uh, he died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Pause. “Say, do you think you could give me a ride to the pub some time?”

…and Bob answered, “No, I don’t think so,” and hung up the phone.

The memories are rolling in and I’m walking inside of them. I see other sidewalks, driveways, old furniture in front yards. It’s cold and grey and not raining. A homeless man rests at the base of a lamppost.

I keep moving. Stores are closed. Railroad tracks, not humming. Sawmill, parking lot empty and the saws are not singing. Blackberries, ripe, but they taste like creosote. Finally there’s a diner open and I come in for a cup of coffee. It smells funny in there and the linoleum is worn and filthy. My hands are cold but the cup is burning in my hands, somehow welcoming.

I remember a time when I didn’t put up with bullshit for very long. I wouldn’t get angry, I’d just get out. Somehow. I mean I can either get up and get out or retreat inside my own head and get out. But you don’t get to have me anymore.

I feel like when Ratso died and Joe Buck looks around at all those people on the bus. And I’m thinking, I just don’t want anything to do with these goddamn people, you know?

One of the times I died was during a freak snowstorm. This was about 20 years ago. We were visiting my mother-in-law in Mission. Now it’s about 9 or 10 o’clock, dark, winter, driving west on that long, straight stretch of road before you get to Silvermere, where they have three gas stations and nothing much else.

And it starts snowing. A few flakes and then suddenly it’s like pillows of snow, clumped together, and the road is covered in seconds. I can’t see more than about a foot past the front of the hood. I’m driving blind and I barely know which side of the highway I’m on, afraid I might rear end somebody, afraid to stop in case I get rear ended, afraid I might meet up with a semi-trailer. All I can do is keep plodding along.

My daughter is about 4 years old, in the back seat, in a car seat, and she’s not worried about anything. My wife beside me and she’s not saying anything, and I’m not saying anything. There’s nothing to say.

I’m thinking, man, this could be the end.

Finally the lights of the gas stations in Silvermere loom up in the sort-of phosphorescent white-darkness of the evening and the snow and I’m able to find the access and slip off the highway to safety.

Or did I? Twenty years ago and I’m a bit hazy on the details. I’m not even sure what happened anymore, there are blank spaces. Twilight zone.

Some version of me made it, I guess.

Another memory, maybe 60 years ago. I was about 3 or 4 years old and I slept with my brother, who is about 8 years older than me. I remember pressing up against his back for the warmth.

I had this dream, a nightmare. I guess you might call this the night of the living axe. I saw it hovering in the air, the handle and blade covered with scales and malevolent eyes on either side of the blade. It attacked my brother, relentlessly chopping at him, he tries to cover up but collapses in the corner. It doesn’t stop and I wake up screaming.

If you could see what I have in my memory you’d probably think it’s just kind of dumb, Hanna-Barbera artwork dumb. But if you could see it and feel it, you’d understand that my recollection still carries the same power over me today that it had on my childish self. And I love my brother, and I’m sorry for a lot of things, and grateful for him, too.

Sometimes I compose verse while walking, let’s try that:

There are bad smells in your house,

Bugs crawling through bread crumbs,

You pick your way along the path

Through the clutter,

From the kitchen

To the couch.

I move old books

From the armchair so I can sit

And eat Kentucky Fried Chicken with you,

We smoke weed and listen to records

And laugh at old black and white movies.

I suppose from outside it seems grim

I suppose many are disgusted at the squalor

But we were laughing, we were laughing

Without a care for the future or the past.

How about another one?

You know I’ve been depressed

Since about 1963

It’s really not so bad

I even sort of enjoy it

Would even celebrate it

Like an anniversary

Pick a date

Buy myself a gift

Make myself a gift

Of depression

Wear it like a shield

Wield it like a boast or a weapon,

Defense against understanding

Defense against intimacy

Defense against intrusions

Yeah, it’s not so bad

It’s often sweet

Comforting, Controlled

You know, only the people and things you love have any power to really hurt you.

Did I say I am not religious? But have a spiritual side? Okay, so how about this, if you believe there is an answer out there.

I think that human beings are insufficiently evolved to see and recognize that answer. We are like chimpanzees, or like the great apes, mountain gorillas, seeing the works of humanity, but simply incapable of gaining access to it.

We are maybe 3 or 4 steps along the way of a journey that has a billion steps. Well, let’s say a gazillion steps, some term that is meaningful but not specifically measurable. We want access to heaven, we want it so bad, and we are truly, acutely and emotionally aware of how ridiculously large the gap is. We want it so bad, we obviously can’t have it, and so it is that we will do anything to somehow jump the queue and achieve an exalted state. We will kill ourselves, kill others, engage in the most reprehensible or stupid conduct, pretend and lie, anything.

But it won’t work. No wonder we cry sometimes.

Oh, yeah, the answer. The answer will be attained and understood and joyfully accepted by something down the road that isn’t remotely recognized in any way as human.

One day not so very long ago, the two of us were walking in the sunshine. We pass through a small park on our regular route and, having rained that morning, the pathway had a few puddles. I saw a Dad struggling along the path with a crutch, accompanied by his little daughter, probably about 3 or 4 years old.

He got around one puddle. His little girl paused at the side and deliberately dipped one shoe into the water, then followed her father. He bypassed the next paddle, and she followed him walking directly through the middle this time to catch up with him, taking his hand and turning her head to look back and see her wet footprints on the path.

I was thinking of how goal oriented we all become. Not just about our careers or our responsibilities, but about what we intend to do next. This fellow had things to do, no doubt, at home. The day at the park was done and now it was time to get back to the house and do his other chores, including the chores of recreation.

But for his little girl, goals were extremely short range. She was in the moment, observant, curious, intent, fascinated. She was learning. Not because she thought it was a good idea for later, or perhaps for a career someday, or for any reason at all. It was because it was the world, this park, these trees, these puddles, these bugs…everything is just fascinating, interesting, fun.

I don’t really know what schools are like today. I like to think they are not quite so deliberately soul crushing as they were in the past. But I do believe that schools…organized, group learning…inevitably and relentlessly destroy a child’s natural love of learning.

Well, we are tribal. We are social. We are organizations. And all of these things have their goals and roles and functions. We have children and we have a need to use them, not merely enjoy them, but to use them to fill our tribal requirements. Their individual happiness or fulfillment is irrelevant to the needs of the group. These things are considerations, but not ultimately compelling ones.

I think we are a long, long way from any kind of truly satisfactory destiny, as a species. Individual desire or even fulfillment of potential is a distant consideration in the grand scheme of societies or governments or cultures.

As we build a technologically self-sufficient world, jobs will mean less and less. In the end I really don’t care if some people want to just lay down, watch television, eat and sleep. I don’t care if all these people have to offer are opinions and ideas and relationships, or even nothing at all. But I think of that little girl and I think of myself and I think that in some or perhaps many or even most ways, our societies are the natural enemies of childhood.

Now I slowly become aware that my wife is speaking to me. I’ve been thinking, not listening. We’re walking through Hammond Park now. I reconstruct my train of thought. Somehow I retrieve something of what she was saying and come up with a reasonable response.

It’s sunny and blue skies and white clouds and green leaves and I’m pretty content to be in this moment, right now, right here, with her. Still, I carry my share of the past with me, too, and I cannot ever unburden myself. If you ever meet me, well, I don’t mean to ignore you. Just understand that you are competing with ghosts for my attention.

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Another aimless, pointless roundtable discussion, from deep in the bowels of the Bajolers archives

Rushmore Revisited: Rock-n-Roll’s Mighty Mountain of Momentous Mayhem

T: Hey, guys, what are the four songs on your Mt. Rushmore of the rock-n-roll era? I don’t mean just rock songs, but the songs of the 1955-2018 era. We are old, so I assume most of them will be old, but that’s up to you. Here are the criteria we came up with yesterday, plus Gary is a criteria fiend, so I’m sure he’ll find more.

Yapping Dogs

Headline after headline this morning, from every direction, says something to the effect of “What happened to the Celtics?” or “Why do the Celtics suck now, when the Cavs sucked last week?” or “The Cavs are now the greatest team in the HISTORY of the – ”

Stop it. Just stop it.

NBA fans are great, but NBA writers are a bunch of reactionary yapping dogs, with the memory of an Alzheimer’s patient in a lethe field. Every year we go through this.

Once again, and PAY ATTENTION, all you journalistic Chicken LIttles who think the sky is falling every time it rains:

– In the NBA playoffs, the series don’t start until the home team loses. Now say that about 15 times, to lock it in.

– Seriously, 15 times. In the NBA, the series don’t start until the home team loses. SAY it.

The Cavs/Celtics series wasn’t over after the Celts won big in game one. It wasn’t over when the Cavs inexplicably stopping trying in the third quarter of game two, electing to huck up brick after brick instead of running their halfcourt offense.

Road teams occasionally steal game one, or catch a team on a bad day and

click to read entire rant

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About Barstool Politickin’

This slack chat website is the brainchild of notorious subversives (and notorious slackers) Johnny “Cake” Hunter and Terry “Chatterin’ Teeth” Vent. You can probably guess who got first pick of nicknames.

These guys have been off the grid for decades. We thought they were traveling the Pacific Rim, trading inflatable Harold Stassen dolls to the natives for Polynesian weed, but we found them hiding in the witness protection program. They entered the program in 1983, after they testified in the infamous “we can’t believe it’s not butter” truth in advertising scandal that took down Orville Redenbacher.

One of them joined a cult and the other one went into the insurance business; I can never keep straight which one sold his soul to an evil demagogue, and which one sells flowers at the airport. Both of them are addicted to Hawaiian pizza, so try not to get roped into a lunch date.

Ideologically, they pretty much hate everybody. Both have cast ballots for chronic losers from the major parties, the occasional third party, and once (I think) for a mollusk. Neither one of them voted for Donald Trump, but they think Ivanka is super hot.

Enjoy the madness.

We have no idea who this is

regards,

D.B. Cooper (shh.)

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GARY FLETCHER

I’ve noticed in the last couple of years that while writing I tend to skip over little words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ and the like. I also sometimes skip over letters. For example, the word ‘look’ turns into ‘lok.’

It gets worse. Now I’m occasionally missing entire words, a real problem for reading comprehension, as you can imagine.

What’s next? Perhaps I’ll write one opening sentence, then the final sentence and completely omit everything between the two. To wit, the following article:

First sentence: “We’re always walking by this spooky old house,” my wife said.

Last sentence: Just understand that you are competing with ghosts for my attention.

The thought amuses me. It’s like one of those ‘choose your own adventure’ books. Anyway, here’s the adventure I chose.

Train of Thought

“We’re always walking by this spooky old house,” my wife said.

We sure are. The two of us go for a constitutional that takes us through the same neighborhoods with routes only slightly different from day to day. Sometimes that means travelling north along Dartford Street to the intersection of Lorne Avenue. The house is one of those old three story jobs with a full basement. It has those narrow, rectangular windows at ground level that let light into the basement and, if you are in the basement, allow you to

Terry’s Latest Rant: Picking my Ideological Poison

I’m not liberal, conservative, a Trump lover or a Trump hater, but I have been accused of being all four. To be clear, my axis goes something like this.

(1) Total, relentless equality is both stupid and against human nature. So stop it with the PC Nazi garbage, use the bathroom that matches your plumbing (not your sexual preferences) and grow up.
(2) Cooperation is a virtue, but so is competition. The key is to balance them out. Don’t outlaw profit, but maybe outlaw franchising, so someone else can make a dammed profit.
(3) we can’t have an incompetent president with the power to blow things up. HIs views on race make him an asshole, but his views on reading and learning are what make him a danger to the nation.
(4) we can’t substitute rights for responsibilities. If you are proud of your vote, you dammed well better have taken some time to know what you were voting for. Or you are nothing more than a faceless lamb, proud of your missing wool as you march to slaughter with your nose in the air.

Most important, know where you are getting your information. Don’t let yourself be sold your news. Read newspapers – plural, don’t just let one guy be your source – and turn off those cable news filler shows. Don’t get your news from Facebook or Twitter or those other so-called media sites (like MSN) that treat gossip like news. It’ll just confuse you.

Contact Us

Email Terry: ventboys@outlook.com

Email Gary: garyafletcher@shaw.ca

Email John:

Or leave a comment under any of the articles.

We aren’t looking for help generating traffic, so don’t waste your time on that, but we’d love to hear from anyone interested in civil discussion, or who has a good knock knock joke, horse racing tip or dirty limerick.

Strangeland

When I read Kathy Gannon’s series about women in Pakistan, I accidentally began at the finish and worked my way back to the start. The backwards view gave me a strange perspective on the culture I was reading about. Rather than reaching the end with hope, understanding that the wheel of change grinds slowly and […]

Sep. 21, 2015 I like Bernie Sanders. Bread and circuses candidates are always popular; I mean, who doesn’t like free bread and circuses? Sep. 28 The latest wisdom … Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz will face off in the end or – if a two-man race doesn’t happen – there will be a brokered convention. […]

based on footage from Vintage Baseball’s YouTube page June 13, 2016 Dizzy Dean leaned forward to take the sign, his hands jostling for position in the crude, tiny leather mitt on his left hand while his elbows performed a lazy, distracted chicken dance in the folds of his wool jersey shirt. Once the catcher gave […]

December 4, 2016 (excerped from a previous article) Do we visualize Willie, Mickey and the Duke, Joe DiMaggio and Ken Griffey Jr. when we think about centerfielders? I do, and it muddies my judgment. I wind up comparing every new centerfielder to the very best who ever played, and I lose perspective. I forget what […]

The Little Red Haired Girl May 11, 2016 During American Idol’s season nine audition rounds, judge Kara Dioguardi gave a serious, meaningful look to a skinny, freckled, ginger-haired hippy girl and said, “You’re great!” with such emphasis that I figured the little hipster in the granny glasses was going to be one of the stars […]

Who cried wolf? There has never been an easier question to answer. Who cried wolf? Well, who has done 98 percent of the crying since last summer? Blame the media if you prefer, but the media is just us, telling each other what’s going on. In the Twitter/Instagram/Facebook world, we are literally the media. Even […]

Her name was fake, but the ink-stained wretch in the monogrammed bloomers was real. Let’s face it; she had to be. Her tale fails miserably as a work of fiction. It’s too pat, too perfect. No self-respecting publisher would buy it. Nellie Bly was thrust into poverty at an early age, during a period in […]

Fletch, the last thing I want to do is impugn the reputation of scrupulous salesmen. There needs to be a different term, I guess. Salesman is taken by the Trump types, though – and they ain’t the types to give anything up, so they ain’t leavin’ – so I suppose it’s gonna have to be […]

For judgment, perspective is everything. I wrote this on April 21, 2016 in response to a poster on BJOL whose perspective is, to put it mildly, a bit demanding. It’s impossible to generate perfect results from imperfect data – and imperfect life forms. I think of it as the 1-10-30 rule, but there are more […]

Like the rest of America, I have been trying to figure out why Donald Trump, a political laughingstock for decades, is suddenly a serious presidential candidate. Why are so many Americans backing Trump, a man with no political skills or experience, for the nation’s top job? To understand the Trump phenomenon, It helps to to […]

Healthcare in English

Burning barn insurance: When your barn catches fire, you immediately call the Allstate office upwind for a quote. In our context, this is the tendency for people to only buy insurance when they anticipate that there will be a need for it (also known as adverse selection).

CAT scan: Computerized axial tomography, used to look inside your body and see just where the cheeseburgers are blocking your arteries.

Co-insurance: The percentage of medical expenses not covered by your insurance; in an 80/20 plan such as Medicare, for example, the 20% is your coinsurance.

Co-payment: A payment charged to you when you see a doctor. Differs from co-insurance in that it is fixed; you will pay the same co-payment at every doctor’s visit regardless of the services you receive.

Contractual adjustment: A discount that is applied to the doctor’s fee by the insurance carrier in order for the doctor to participate in the insurance carrier’s network. Typically around 40% of the doctor’s gross bill.

Deductible: An amount charged to you before your insurance will begin to pay.

Flexible spending account (FSA): A plan which allows employees to put money into an account pre-tax to be used for medical expenses. This money must be spent in the tax year in which it is deducted.

Health Savings Account (HSA): A plan which allows employees to put money into an account pre-tax to be used for medical expenses. Differs from an FSA in that the money in the account can be carried over from year to year.

In-network: A physician who participates with a particular insurance carrier.

Medicaid: Government insurance plan for low-income people.

Medicare: Government insurance plan for senior citizens and the disabled.

Out-of-network: A physician who does not participate with a particular insurance carrier.

Palliative care: Care that is intended to relieve pain only; not curative or therapeutic treatment.

Participation: When a doctor agrees to accept an insurance carrier’s discounted rate (plus co-payments and co-insurance, if any) as payment in full for services rendered.